Posted Jun-21-2008 By

jtat

Posted Jun-21-2008 By

House3

Actually, the Flintstones was shown not as "Children's Television" it was the first cartoon that was shown during the prime time hours for the family and adults. Hence the advertising and sponsership advertisements.

Posted Jun-21-2008 By

grayokc

Posted Jun-21-2008 By

TJFF

The Flintstones first went on the air on September 30, 1960, it was ballyhooed as "an adult cartoon." I'm not sure what that meant in 1960...maybe that the leads weren't talking animals. Or maybe it just meant that the ads were targeted at grown-ups.

It aired Friday nights on ABC. That season, ABC opened the evening at 7:30 with Matty's Funday Funnies, a Mattel-sponsored series that recycled old Paramount cartoons like "Herman and Katnip." Then the 8:00 show was a series witMore..h no kid appeal at all %u2014 Harrigan and Son, a talky sitcom starring Pat O'Brien as a feisty old lawyer who was joined in his firm by his offspring. This then led into The Flintstones at 8:30, which was followed by 77 Sunset Strip, The Detectives and a great comedy/drama called The Law and Mr. Jones which starred James Whitmore.
Obviously, if you were a programmer looking to keep an audience around from show to show, you would have gone from Matty's Funday Funnies to The Flintstones and then to Harrigan and Son and the cop shows. But ABC obviously didn't figure that the kids who watched the 7:30 cartoon show would be interested in the Hanna-Barbera sitcom...or maybe it was the Winston people who felt that way, which is why they agreed to sponsor it. Either way, it wasn't long before someone decided The Flintstones had kid appeal. At first, they didn't move it. The following season, it was still at 8:30 on Fridays but its lead-in was The Hathaways, a sitcom that starred Jack Weston and Peggy Cass as a married couple raising the Marquis Chimps. Eventually, the Modern Stone Age Family was moved to Thursday nights at 7:30, by which time the tobacco commercials were gone and Fred and Wilma instead did commercials for Welch's grape juice and One-a-Day Multi-Vitamins. (That's how it is in life: One day, you're selling vitamins. The next day, you are one.)Less..